Private LTE & 5G Networks Report: February 2020

Private LTE & 5G Networks Report: February 2020

The deployment of private mobile networks has emerged as an important market. In fact so important that the market could – according to Arthur D Little – be worth as much as €60–70 billion by 2025. This implies rapidly growing adoption among the 14–15 million potential sites for private LTE networks identified by Nokia last year in an interview with EnterpriseIotInsights.

The demand for private LTE (and increasingly, 5G) networks has been driven by the spiralling data requirements of modern business and government entities. Organisations of all types are combining connected systems with big data and analytics to transform operations, increase automation and efficiency, or to deliver new services to their users. Wireless networking with LTE enables these transformations to take place even in dynamic, remote or highly secure environments, while offering the scale benefits of a technology that has already been deployed worldwide.

The arrival of LTE-Advanced systems has delivered a step change in network capacity and throughput, while 5G networks have brought improved density (support for larger numbers of users or devices), even greater capacity again, as well as dramatic improvements to latency that enable use of mobile technology for time-critical applications.

In addition to companies looking to develop their own private mobile networks for the first time, there is a large base of potential customers who currently operate LMR/PMR private networks based on technologies such as TETRA, P25 and DMR. These customers – through the TCCA (see side box) – are demanding critical broadband services that are simply not available from alternative technologies and consequently, private LTE and 5G networks have the potential to eventually replace much of this market.

The exact number of existing private LTE deployments is hard to determine, as details are not often made public. GSA is aware of more than 150 private LTE deployments, but estimates the actual number of existing private LTE networks to be much higher than this, and to have grown quickly during 2019. We will be tracking deployments in the coming months, and reporting on the speed of the market’s evolution.

Benefits and buyers

The benefits of deploying private mobile networks based on LTE or 5G can include:

• security and data control: with full separation from wider public mobile networks.
• access to services: in locations not reached by public networks (improved coverage indoors, in remote areas, or in underground locations).
• flexibility: mobile networks can be used in dynamic environments where equipment needs to move about and where fixed cabling either gets in the way or is costly to reconfigure or relocate.
• improved quality of service: where licence-exempt technologies such as WiFi cannot meet an organisation’s capacity, availability, latency, failover, or throughput requirements. Mobility and coverage are key issues experienced by customers deploying WiFi networks.
• customisation: the parameters of the networks can be configured (and reconfigured) to meet an organisation’s exact specifications.
• integration with wider public mobile networks where services are required outside the private campus or regional network (only realistically possible through roaming onto a public mobile operator’s network).

©GSA 2020

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Private LTE & 5G Networks Report: February 2020